by Proehl, Bob
“He’s right,” Fahima says. She’s had Sarah in her head once or twice. She isn’t a big fan.
“Latent memories decay,” says Sarah. “Tomorrow there are details that could be gone. Details we need to figure out what’s happened.”
“We’ll figure it out some other way,” Fahima says. “Emmeline gets the night off.”
Emmeline smiles at her, then at Patrick. Then she smiles at Sarah, too. She would have let Sarah do it, Fahima thinks, impressed by the girl’s bravery.
“Is someone going to tell me what happened?” Avi asks. There’s so much to explain to him. Everything that happened in the Hive is a violation of rules, of laws he’s never known existed. They have to be careful not to overload him. Not to break him.
“Someone tried to take her,” Fahima says. “Someone incredibly strong.” Even this isn’t entirely true. Fahima’s not sure it was someone. She puts her hand lightly on the girl’s head, her fingers swallowed in twists of hair. “Emmeline was stronger. She’s fucking amazing.”
“Let’s get this fucking amazing little girl home,” Kimani says from the doorway. Emmeline jumps out of Avi’s arms and runs to her. Avi looks after Emmeline, stricken. Too exhausted to fight, he goes to follow.
Before he can step through the door, Fahima grabs his arm and pulls him close. “It’ll happen again,” she says. “She needs to learn to protect herself.”
“I’ll teach her to—”
“You can’t,” Fahima says. She sees his face fall as something breaks in him, a hope he’d held on to. Fahima drops his hand, letting him go back to his daughter.
Everything is set into place, a great Rube Goldberg device of information, waiting for its first domino to be tipped. Fahima sends documentation to the networks, giving them time to confirm. She uses Avi’s contacts and elicits promises not to run with anything before the Trib article. She’s been working with scientists across the country for years to prove that Resonants can do the things they do. He’s hurt that he wasn’t the only baseliner brought in, but he understands the need. A flood of scientific papers is in the pipeline, held back by nondisclosure agreements that will be lifted once Avi’s pieces go public. The science is opaque to him. His job is to communicate who they are, not what. It’s to make them people rather than biological oddities, rather than freaks. He’s confident he’s pulled it off. The next few days and weeks and months will tell. He thinks about what will happen to Emmeline if he hasn’t.
The Trib article is written as a trumpet blast. The Atlantic piece, scheduled to come out three days later, is the culmination of the last two months of Avi’s life. It’s a sprawling 10,000-word article with Bishop, Patrick, and a glowing girl named Marian on the cover looking like the cast of a summer blockbuster. It maps out more of Resonant culture and delves into whatever science Fahima could explain to him. It wasn’t everything. Avi signed NDAs protecting the locations of the academy and the Commune, along with the identities of Resonants who wanted to speak off the record and watch the dust settle before outing themselves. Avi pointed out that there was enough information about Kevin Bishop in the piece that a savvy reporter could find the school with a reasonable amount of digging. Kimani told him they were taking care of it.
On the February morning when the headline on the Trib reads “They Walk Among Us” with Avi Hirsch’s byline below it, the article simmers. The biggest news stories have context, a connection to the previously known. Bombshells about the president assume that the reader knows who the president is. Celebrity shockers are built on a base understanding of a culture of stardom and familiarity with the famous person in question. The Trib story comes out of nowhere, science fiction intruding on the real world.
The world doesn’t wake with the knowledge that everything has changed. The realization settles in gradually. In the house on Jarvis Avenue, where they’ve let their subscription to the Trib lapse, the morning routine goes on as usual. Avi fixes breakfast. Kay reads her book. Emmeline half sings a Stevie Wonder song they heard on the car radio yesterday, filling in the words she doesn’t know with tuneless nonsense sounds. Every so often she catches Avi’s eye. They haven’t talked about what happens next. Publication means a hard stop for the secret they’ve kept from Kay. It will be good to be rid of it. It’s become a fourth person in the house, a lodger who’s never seen but whose presence is felt in another room, listening at the door. Once the secret is out, their lives will return to what they were before, as if by becoming public and shared, the facts he’s hidden from Kay will cease to be.
Avi puts it out of his mind as he cooks breakfast, as he drives Kay to the station and kisses her good-bye. He’s relieved when she bypasses the news vendor in her rush to catch the train. He drops Emmeline off at school and watches her puffy purple coat blend into a scrum of soft, round bodies. He wonders how long before the story trickles down to these kids. How many will recognize Emmeline instantly as one of the people the story is about.
He picks up a copy of the Trib on his way home but doesn’t bother to read it. He’s worked on it for so long that he can recite all fifteen hundred words. At home, he sets up a Google alert for the word Resonant and for his own name. Not a Twitter user, he looks up #Resonant and mentions of the Trib’s Twitter handle. He waits, uselessly refreshing pages that auto-update if they have anything new to show. He hates the phrase go viral. It converts language and thought into biological weapons. But he is waiting for his story to do just that. He’s the epidemiologist watching for red spots to appear on a map, waiting for the screen to flood while worrying about what will happen when it does. He knows the screen is only the map, not the territory. Behind it, there are lives about to change, Resonant and baseliner. Emmeline’s. His.
Around lunch, the story begins to move of its own accord. It looks nothing like a virus. It looks like fireworks. Someone with a significant number of followers posts the story, and there’s a burst. Another over there, in some fiefdom of the Internet. Responses are stunned or mocking. WTAF? and Did you see this? Posters ask if the Trib’s been bought out by Weekly World News or if it’s possible for a newspaper to straight up lose its collective mind.
Then people start to post sightings, confirmations. To give a thing a name is to call it into being, bring it forth into people’s consciousness. Avi read an article once about Homer’s persistent description of the Aegean as “the wine-dark sea,” referring to the sky as bronze no matter the time of day. A linguist theorized that at the time the Iliad and the Odyssey were written, there was no Greek word for blue. In most languages, blue is one of the youngest color words. Without a word to describe it, the ancient Greeks didn’t perceive things as blue. Their sky was bronze, their sea a deep and frothing purple. The word Resonant illuminates a blank space in people’s minds, and #Resonant begins to yield results. A little girl in Omaha who flew away from schoolyard bullies and never came back. The man in Durham who was arrested for simultaneously robbing two banks on opposite sides of the city, then bailed out by an identical twin records showed he didn’t have. A schoolteacher in Cincinnati who healed a kid’s broken arm by the laying on of hands. People had seen things, but without a word to attach to them, a conceptual hashtag, they filed them as miracles and hallucinations. Now they know better.
Another strain arises along with the sightings. People coming out. People admitting who and what they are to the world. Some of the responses to this are terrible, hateful things, death threats and rape threats. Those who step forward are called freaks and monstrosities. But there’s support, too, and something like religious awe. And there are aspirants, wannabes. You’re amazing, they say. How do I become like you?
Avi’s first call is from CNN. They want him on the air that night or the next morning. It’s clear they’re settling for him. What they want is an actual Resonant, someone to do tricks live on air. “Can you bring anyone with you?” the segment producer asks. Not yet, Avi thinks. All of this
has been planned out, timed. First him, then them. He does a phone interview with Lakshmi Rameswaram, an NPR host he knows from Chicago media functions back when he attended such things. Her questions are vague. Most of them amount to, Is this happening? He assures her he’s met dozens of Resonants and they are very much real. We should have laid more groundwork ahead of time, he thinks. We should have been more prepared. There was no way to know. Anything done for the first time unleashes a demon.
It turns out other people were ready. The Kindred Network, a consortium of right-wing television and radio stations, bumps one of its AM radio wingnuts up to the television side. Jefferson Hargrave has a camera ready in his studio, which looks like it’s been set up in a supply closet.
“I’ve been warning people for years,” he says in the frothing patter of a manic street preacher. “You can check the archives on my website. I’ve devoted hours of my program. I wasn’t collaborating at the level of this reporter.” He slaps a folded copy of the Trib he’s using as a prop. It’s yesterday’s edition, but the effect is the same. “I didn’t know there was a fancy name for it. I didn’t have the kind of documentation he does. But I had the knowledge. I had the testimony of honest Americans about what they saw. And I think the thing left out of this little article is what do they want? Why step forward now? I saw the piece in the paper with that headline, ‘They Walk Among Us,’ but what I read was ‘We Come in Peace.’ And we’ve all seen movies where the aliens who look just like us show up and claim they come in peace. When they claim they want to work alongside us for the betterment of humanity even though they themselves aren’t human. We know the two ways that movie ends. It ends up with the humans in concentration camps and cattle pens. Or it ends with a group of humans, maybe only a couple, rising up to stop whatever these things are from taking what’s ours.”
Avi opens his in-box. It was empty a week ago, but the number of messages is climbing through the low thousands. He goes downstairs to fix himself something to eat before diving in.
Kay’s in the living room. She looks surprised when he comes down the stairs. “I called for you,” she says. “I thought you were out.” She has a copy of the Trib in her hand, rolled like she’s about to swat something with it.
“I must not have heard you,” he says.
She nods, collecting herself. Avi sees what’s coming before she speaks. Maybe I’m like them, he thinks. Maybe I can see the future.
“You need to tell me about this,” she says, tapping the newspaper. “You need to tell me about our daughter right now.”
“I know,” says Avi.
“Did you think you could keep it secret?” Kay says. “It’s on the front page of the fucking Trib.”
“She’s not mentioned—”
“Anyone who’s not an idiot can read her in here,” says Kay. “My mother will know.”
“I didn’t know where to start,” Avi says.
“Start with Emmeline.”
“She’s one of them,” he says. “A Resonant.”
“How long?”
“I think they’re born that way,” he says. “But Emmeline—”
“How long have you known?”
“A month,” he says. “Two months.”
“You both kept it from me,” Kay says. “I’m assuming you discussed keeping it a secret. How did you not tell me?”
“The day I found out, we just didn’t say anything,” says Avi. “We didn’t know how. Every day we didn’t tell you became one more thing we’d have to explain.” He’s aware that saying we over and over is a way to protect himself, to use Emmeline as a shield. He needs every defense. “Not telling you became easier.”
“Oh, good,” she says. “I’m glad it was easy for you.”
“It wasn’t—”
“What can she do?” Kay says. “What’s her superpower?”
“They don’t say superpower,” Avi says.
“What can she do?”
“We don’t know yet,” says Avi. “Sometimes it takes a while for abilities to manifest. Emmeline is young. But Kevin Bishop says—”
“This is the person who bribed me with a box of comic books.”
“He runs a school,” Avi says. “An academy.”
“I read the article,” Kay says.
“It’s in New York,” says Avi. “That’s not in the article, but it’s in Midtown. Emmeline and I have been talking, and we think—”
“You have a plan, Avi?” she snaps. “Because we’re still recovering from your last plan. We’re paying medical bills and waiting to see if you climb out of the pit you’ve been in since your last plan. Do you even recognize what this is? It’s one more war zone. It’s all the excitement of Darfur and Mosul right in our living room. And you get to bring Emmeline with you.” She rubs her hand over her face. “Fuck, this Kevin Bishop saw you coming. I mean, he piqued my interest with a fat check and a box of back issues. But they had you at go, didn’t they?”
Avi stands under her glare, waiting for it to cool. Silence is no better than yelling. He puts his hands up, patting the air between them. “I want us to talk about what’s best for Emmeline.”
“You don’t get to decide what we talk about,” she says. She slaps the newspaper again, the same way the man on television did. “What does this have to do with the church bombing? There’s nothing in here about Salem Baptist.”
“It was one of them,” Avi says. “They asked me not to write about it.”
“They can blow up buildings?”
“They caught him,” says Avi, as if her question is about Owen Curry in particular and not the dangers of the new world she’s watching dawn, the sharks their daughter might swim among.
* * *
—
Things become awful between them, but quietly. Silently. Kay speaks to him when it’s absolutely necessary. She finds reasons to stay late at work. When she comes home, she pours herself an overfull glass of wine and sits in the kitchen, reading old comic books, taking each out of its sleeve and holding it so it obscures her face. She eats dinner on her own, reheating whatever Avi and Emmeline had. Emmeline goes in to talk to her sometimes, and Avi strains his attention toward them, hoping to hear something. From what he can tell, they don’t discuss Emmeline’s ability. They talk about books and television shows. They make small talk like they’re on a first date or a layover in an airport bar. They tread neutral ground.
This goes on for a week, each of them retreating to his or her own area of the house as early in the evening as possible. Emmeline puts herself to bed. Kay sets the box of comics in front of her on the couch, a glass of wine on the end table. Avi ascends to the attic, going over his notes on Owen Curry. A piece he’s promised himself he’ll never publish. The hatch to the attic rattles. It does this in the winter when the front door opens, a shift in the house’s air pressure he’s learned to ignore. It’s after eight, so Avi climbs down to investigate. At the bottom of the stairs, Kay holds the door open for Kevin Bishop. He’s standing in the cold, brown paper bag tucked under his arm, while she decides whether to invite him in, hand on her hip. After leaving him in the cold a while, Kay steps aside.
Bishop looks up at Avi. “The articles have been well received,” he says. “Congratulations.”
“I’ll leave you to it,” Kay says. She turns to go.
“Stay,” Bishop says. Kay stops abruptly, as if she’s forgotten something.
“Are you in my head right now?” she says. “Did you—”
“A reflex,” Bishop says. “I’m sorry. It’s disrespectful, and I won’t do it to you again. It’s you I came to speak with. I need to talk to you about Emmeline.”
“She’s the only reason I let you in this door,” Kay says. Avi catches her glance as she says this, spreading her anger around without thinning it one bit. “I don’t want you in my head or in my house. I don’t wa
nt your money or—”
“We can talk about that,” Bishop says. “Is there somewhere we can sit?”
“Kitchen,” says Kay.
Bishop hands the paper bag off to Avi. Inside, two glass bottles clink together. “Would you mind?” Bishop says. Exacting instructions for making a gin martini appear in Avi’s head, along with a specific craving for one. The craving is recognizably foreign to him, a thought that is not his own. It’s like having something on the surface of his eye that affects his vision, except it’s on his brain, overlaying his thoughts. He goes to the freezer to get ice as Bishop and Kay sit at the table, well within earshot.
“I’ve made every possible misstep with you,” Bishop says to Kay. Avi searches the cupboards for their martini glasses, which are tucked deep behind a legion of wineglasses. They are not cocktail people. “I’m usually so good at reading people.”
Kay laughs, a tight exhalation of air. Avi sets three glasses on the counter and drops ice cubes into each one to chill it. A chilled glass is an important and often overlooked part of the drink, he thinks. It’s not something he knew a minute ago.
“My impression of you was that you needed to find your own way to discovery,” Bishop says. “In my defense, I believed I had more time. I’ve been trying to determine the best way to approach you since the beginning of summer.”
Three ice cubes clink loudly into the shaker. Avi is disappointed with the quality of the ice. He doesn’t know what good ice would look like, but this isn’t it. Within the script for cocktail construction he’s playing out, another thought emerges. Bishop was thinking of approaching Kay in the summer. She was the first choice. He was a consolation prize, the one who didn’t need to be finessed. He measures out the gin and pours it over the ice.